


How to be Good

by Aliana



Series: Do No Harm [11]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Education, Gondor, Houses of Healing, Medicine, Minas Tirith, Minor Character(s), Original Character(s), POV First Person, Pre-modern proto-feminism, Surgery, Third Age
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-25
Updated: 2014-01-20
Packaged: 2018-01-06 00:29:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 9,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1100336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aliana/pseuds/Aliana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the good people of Minas Tirith try to pull things back together and make sense of old and new in a post-Ring War Middle-earth.  Picks up where the main narrative of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/364151/chapters/591380">Fallen</a> leaves off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Debt

“What’s this?” I held the paper up for Valacar to see.

He examined it, then went back to cleaning a saw. “It looks,” he said, “like a payment notice for an apprenticeship bond.”

“My bond.” I folded it away, and then folded my arms. “The bursary clerk said you paid it.”

“Then it must be true.” He put down the saw and started on another one, bunching the cloth into thick folds and working in sharp movements so that the material would not catch on the teeth.

“I told you, I wanted to pay for it, myself. Or, we did—my mother and I. She practically paid for my healer’s apprenticeship, herself, when I was younger.” Which was nearly true. There had also, I learned later, been some money from my father, and a fair bit of credit involved—though that latter was beside the point, since she always paid on time.

He held up the blade to examine his work.

“Are you listening?” I asked.

He nodded, but did not stop what he was doing.

“There was some talk on the Council of whether a girl ought to pay an apprentice’s bond for surgery at all,” I said. “On account of it seemed a hardship for the family, to be expected to pay one of the costliest bonds, and a dowry all for the same child.”

“Not without logic, I warrant.”

“But several of the Councilors said that that did not matter, as a girl with such a trade would most likely be unmarriageable, anyway.”

He lifted a brow. “Pity.”

“But I wanted to pay it,” I continued. “For myself. I don’t want to be in anyone’s debt.”

“You aren’t in my debt. Nor is your brother, or your cousin, who may have bonds of their own to pay soon.”

“That’s very kind. But it’s no trouble of yours.” 

“I would beg to differ,” he said. 

I opened my mouth, but he cut me off. “And your mother—a widow with three children? Just after the war?” He shook his head. “I understand why you want to pay, but no.”

“We manage.”

“And I have no one for whom to manage but myself.”

“Valacar—”

“You’ll be twenty soon, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Birthday gift, then. It’s an important year.”

I shook my head. 

“Don’t be proud,” he said, and his voice had the edge it assumed whenever he wanted to end a conversation. Which was quite often. “You should be proud in some things, but not this.” He paused. “All right?” he asked, although it was not really a question.

I was silent for several moments. Then I nodded. “Thank you,” I said.

“We’ll not speak of it again.” 

“When do we begin?” I asked.

“Have you had the indenture written up yet?”

“The clerk said he’d have it ready tomorrow.”

“One year’s trial?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Tomorrow, then.” He paused, and seemed to consider me for several moments. “You’ll be good,” he said. 

Unlike with his previous statements, I was not sure whether it was a pronouncement or a question.

“I’ll try.”

“That’s not half of it,” he said. “I know you work hard, and you’re not a fool.” He paused. “The problem is everyone else. Others won’t know what to make of you, at least at first. They’ll not know what to do with you.”

I nodded. 

“You’ll be watched. You’ll have to be twice as good as everyone else.”

I said nothing.

“What we do in here is quite simple, when it comes down to it.” He eyed the saw he had set down on the table. “Everything else is hard. So you will need to be very, very good at all of it. Do you understand?”

“Perhaps.”

“You’ll see soon enough.”


	2. Corridor

On my first morning of my apprenticeship, Fíriel stood in the doorway of the surgery.

“You look nice,” she said, indicating the surcoat I wore over my dress. It took the place of the smock I’d worn when I worked on the wards. “It suits you.”

I shrugged. “It’s grey, like everyone else wears.”

“Like the surgeons wear,” she corrected me. “And it matches your eyes.”

“It matches everyone’s eyes,” said Valacar. He had not looked up from his notes.

“Beren’s got blue eyes,” I put in.

“Then it’s good that he’s not a surgeon, isn’t it?” said Valacar.

“She looks nice, doesn’t she?” Fíriel asked him.

Valacar looked up and considered the two of us. “Yes,” he said. “But I won’t congratulate her on it. It’s not what she’s here for.”

Fíriel rolled her eyes. “Be sure and keep him out of trouble,” she said to me.

“I’ll try.”

“Good.” 

After she left, I went to shut the door.

“Keep it open,” Valacar said. 

“Why?” 

“Because that’s what you do.”

“I don’t like it.”

“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “Always keep the door open when you work with a man.”

“Even with you?”

“Especially with me.” 

“But—”

“Always think of the way things look. From the outside.”

I said nothing.

“Here,” he said, and stepped towards me. There was a loose flagstone on the floor, and he pushed it against the jamb with the side of his foot and then shut the door on it so that it stayed ajar. 

I peered through the crack, into the narrow strip of hallway that I could still see. There was still something that I liked awfully well about being on the bolt-side of a shut door—a properly shut door.

I looked at him again. I thought of how things looked from the outside. “I wouldn’t have thought of that. How do you know it matters?”

“Because it’s what I do.”

And we spoke no more on the subject.


	3. Corners

“We’re cleaning today,” he said.

I could see no dust in the corners. As usual, the benches and tables looked spotless; the maids would have been over everything just yesterday, as they did every week in their endless shifts of rounds throught the Houses. If you pressed us, most of the healers in the houses—and the surgeons, it went without saying—would eventually admit that we saw scrubbing and sweeping away from our own homes to be below our stations. The War had been the stark exception to this, with the cleaners gone from their posts. Even then, of course, the great bulk of the laundry and washing had fallen to the girls. I was none to keen to start up again. “Seems clean, already.”

“Seems,” he repeated. “Get some water.”

I picked up the pail that stood in the corner, turned to leave, but then thought and turned back to him again. “I have plenty of cleaning to do at home.”

“Then you’re already good at it.”

“Do I need more practice?”

“It’s not about practice,” he said, mildly. “It’s about keeping things clean. The water, please.” 

I took a breath.

“Don’t sigh,” he said, as I was about to exhale in a sigh. So instead, I bit it in, and shook my head. And I obeyed, heading down the corridor and off to the nearest pump, which was in the main atrium. The stone basin beneath it was shallow, but let out into troughs on both sides which ran out into the gardens and the street. There had been one day during the Siege when the gutters had run pink, almost as if they were veins, and all the stone alive with blood. But today, when I pushed down on the handle, there was nothing but the good clear water from the cisterns. As always the iron of the pump was cold and hard, and I wrapped a section of my skirts around my palm to keep it from digging in too much.

“We’ll start with the instruments,” he said when I returned with the heavy pail in hand. Already he was unrolling them from their wraps and cases. “How often do you suppose you have to go over them?”

“Each time I use them?”

“And twice a week, on top of that. And see that you keep them in a dry place. Out of the damp.”

“Even when I have an apprentice to do it for me?” I asked.

“An apprentice to help you,” he said. “But that may not be for a few years, yet.” And he smiled a little, then.

We sat across from one another at the high bench, passing cloths over blades and handles, over the joints of forceps and clamps and picks. I lined them up and named them, one by one.

After the instruments, there was the room, itself, to clean. In the Houses, the surgeries were all marble, which made them easy to keep tidy, and cooler during the hot days. In the cold months, however, they might as well have been walls of ice, inflicting a wretched bone-chill after even a few minutes spent within them. In the winter, all the surgeons kept braziers full of coal, which on some days were enough, and more often were not.

My mother kept a very neat home, and had for as long as I remembered. Still, to work in the smooth cool chambers of the Houses was to see a certain grittiness when one came home in the evening: shadows of soot stains from the hearth on the walls, cracks in the wooden beams, grains of dust at the edges of the floor mats. The stone of the Houses would take nothing in, not even sound, as voices echoed in the broad spaces.

“What are you thinking about?”

I turned around and he was wringing out another wash rag.

“Do all the apprentices have to do this much cleaning?” I asked. My hands and my shoulders were beginning to ache, and my fingers were cold from the water and the marble.

“They should,” he replied. “It doesn’t matter how cleverly you can cut and sew; it’ll all come to naught if you leave a dirty wound.”

I nodded. It seemed as though most of the day had gone by, already. Then, home to the old things, the rush mats on the floor, and the creaking wood, my mother kneeling by the hearth. I was still re-acquainting myself with everything, both here and there.

“Nearly finished?” I asked.

Valacar smiled again. “We’re only getting started.”


	4. Margins

There were a great many things to commit to memory, some of which I already knew and some of which were unfamiliar to me. There were all the instruments, and beyond that the names and shapes of the bones and muscles. Lying in bed at night, I would go over them in my mind, starting at the feet and moving up from there.

There were books on hand in the Houses, guides to all the herbs and draughts, and thick surgery manuals that seemed heavier in my arms than the paving stone we used to prop open the door. On the inside, the writing, too, seemed like stones, stacked densely in wall after wall. I stared at them and took in nothing.

“We won’t use those,” Valacar said when he saw me looking at the pages.

“No?”

“Not at first. But since you have this here, now,” he said, peering over my shoulder, “look.” He placed his finger on the narrow margins of the text, where thin, faint notes and sketches had been drawn. I turned to another page, and another; on some, there was still empty white space around the words, and others were crowded with writing in different hands, some easier to make out than others. There were pages where lines had been marked and underlined; some of the annotations had their own annotations. I remembered a book of Valacar’s that he’d shown me, once. It had been a history book, some of the pages were marked in the same way.

“How old is this book?” I asked him, now. He took it from me, leafed back to the front, examined the inside cover.

“About two hundred years,” he said. “Which is fairly young, as far as books of this sort go.”

He handed it back to me. I opened it at random, stared at it again.

“So most of these people are dead,” I said, pointing to the writings in the margins of the page I had chosen.

“I would imagine so, yes.”

I practiced reading simpler things, at first, and writing. I copied notes on to scraps of paper, writing them out from memory. It was slow work.

“Finished?” I would ask, pushing the paper away. I felt as if I had spent a very long time on very little work, the few thin letters poor consolation for my efforts.

“One more,” he would say. He was far more patient with me than I ever was with myself. He never gave me corrections as I wrote, which was just as well, as it would have made me even more anxious. Instead he took the scraps of paper afterward, laying a finger over any mistake I had made and asking me what corrections were called for.

He never gave me corrections as I wrote, and he also rarely said, “Understood?” Over my years in the Houses I’d seen a great many of the surgeons and healers and herbalists with their apprentices, and that word was a refrain for many of them. 

“If you say it like that,” Valacar explained to me at one point, “it stops doing what it’s supposed to do. You say ‘understood?’ and people will only nod, whether they understand or not. No one wants to look a fool.”

“Not understanding isn’t the same as being a fool,” I said.

“No, but some people are afraid that the two things will look the same. So I don’t say it.” 

Instead, he asked me pointed questions that required more of an answer than a nod or a shake of the head: “When should you used a curve blade to amputate?” or “What is the best way to stanch bleeding for an arrow wound?” And so I could hardly ever say only, “Yes” or “No.”

One morning I came in and he was standing with his arms crossed in front of him, staring at something that was sitting on the table. It was a small pale wooden box, the lid laid open on its hinges.

Inside the case were a number of instruments, mostly scalpels, each one laid in its own compartment, and a name written on the inside of the lid in neat, cramped script. I found I could read it and recognize it almost instantly, and I was hit with the pleasure of this fact at the same time that a pang of sorrow hit me. “That was his,” I said. 

“His” meant Laeron’s.

Valacar nodded. “Ioreth found it, off in a storeroom somewhere.” He shook his head. “How it ended up there, only the Valar know.”

He was quiet, too, for what seemed like a very long time. Finally he glanced at me as if he had just remembered that I was still there. “All right,” he said, and he closed the box.

He didn’t speak much for the rest of the morning. He had a distracted air about him. And that was what passed for a bad day, with him, I think.

We all had our nightmares and our share of bad days. You might think that just after the War ended, that was when we would have had most of our troubles, when the bruises were still dark. But just after the War there was the new King, and there were flower- and wine-scented days, and the giddy relief of having regained one’s balance after a near fall, light-headed and stupidly grateful.

It was only after this, after things began to settle back into some sort of pattern, that the memories began stealing back into our days. Often they would take us by surprise. And sometimes it was only a moment that was lost in this way, but sometimes it would be a whole day and perhaps a whole night to go with it. And so I could tell that Valacar was having a bad day if he was absent, like this. And when Elloth was having a bad day, she would not hum while she worked in the dispensary, but stand at the end of the work-bench and grind mortar into pestle with unnecessary force. Beren would kick at loose paving-stones, like a young boy.

When I had a bad day, I jumped. I could sometimes feel it coming on in the morning, and I knew that I would start at the least noise or shadow. I knew, and I started anyway, and memories came back to me in small sharp fragments. Sometimes the whetstone would drop from my fingers or the blade would slip in my hand. Much of the time there was no cut, but sometimes there would be a small nick, a drop of blood. One day Valacar looked at my marked-up fingers and said, “You’ll to cut yourself to ribbons, one of these days.” He paused. “Or better yet, someone else.”

“That isn’t funny,” I said.

“It wasn’t a joke,” he replied. 

On the day that he’d found Laeron’s extra scalpels, I thought that I might do best to let him alone. So in the afternoon I asked him if I could go to Laeron’s house and ask his mother what she wanted to do with his things, and Valacar gave me leave with a nod, and slid the box across the table towards me.

I held it cradled beneath my left arm when I went to knock on Laeron’s family’s door. I had only met his mother a few times, but she seemed a very kind lady. I had taken off my grey surcoat and now I wore only my faded blue work dress; I did not want to come to her house with such a strong sign that I was the one to have taken her son’s place, though she knew enough that I had.

However well she knew this, she smiled when she saw me, and she took me into her kitchen and fed me even though I had already eaten in the Houses. I must have looked something awful well into the first year after the War, because people seemed always to want to feed me. There must have been something in the size of my eyes or the line of my jaw that inspired a hasty setting of plates on to tables and butter on to bread.

Because she was a good hostess, she also ate so as not to make me feel awkward, though it was well after midday. She asked after my family. When I set the box in front of her and explained how we’d come by it, she only nodded. She lifted the lid and then took each of the scalpels between her fingers, one at a time. She seemed to be considering each one in turn, and she did not look at me. For some reason I felt I should not be looking, so I stared at my hands in my lap.

I looked up again when I heard the lid closing. She slid the box back across the table towards me.

“Have you any use for these, then?” she asked me.

“Well,” I began, “yes, but…” I was not sure if I wanted to take them back.

“Then you should have them,” she said. “You, or someone else who can use them. They’re no use to us.”

“Are you sure?” 

“He would have wanted them to be of use to someone,” she said.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

We were both silent for what seemed like a long time, and I stared into my lap, again. Then she began: “I wanted to ask you…”

I looked up. 

“I wanted to ask you, if you’d read the letter he’d left for you.”

I shook my head, felt my skin flush. “I’m still practicing my letters, so I thought I might wait. Until I can read it for myself.”

She nodded, gracious. “Fair enough. That’s a good girl.”

“Come back and visit,” she said as she saw me out later. “Whenever you like.” Her hand was warm on my shoulder.

“Thank you,” I said, and I left. I had not blushed because I could not yet read well enough to decipher a full letter, but rather because I knew that I would never read it, even when I could read whole books: the black stone walls of text, and all the notes in the margins. The letter was in a small box beneath my bed, and soon the smaller box with the scalpels would join it. I would not take them out, again, until I was to be married, and getting ready to leave my mother’s house. And, most of all, I had felt embarrassed because I knew, even then, that I would probably never call on Laeron’s mother, this kind, lovely woman who fed me, and who had raised my friend, and who had left him in the City, only to find him gone at War’s end.


	5. Honesty

“Never sat a horse before?” Ceorth said. “Not so much as a pony?”

“You know that very well,” I said. “Don’t pretend to gape, Ceorth. It’s not becoming.”

He smiled. “Fine. But you want to learn?”

“I do.”

He nodded. “You’ll need to wear good shoes. And a wide-cut skirt,” he added, glancing towards the hem of my dress.

“But don’t women use a side saddle?” I asked.

“No pupil of mine is riding side saddle, especially not some green girl like you. It isn’t safe. Easy to get your feet caught, and dragged to your death.”

“Dragged?”

“I mean, you’re in no danger of being dragged, at any rate. Not with me. But all the same you’d do best to learn on a real saddle.”

I looked at my feet, and then over at some of the riders near the paddock. “If I sit astride, my ankles might show,” I pointed out.

“Why on earth would I care what your ankles look like?” he demanded. “They’re pretty much all the same—you should know that as well as anyone.” He shook his head. “You City girls. Ridiculous.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

True to his word, he met me at the stables the next day. He led a tawny-colored animal out to me in the paddock.

“He’s awfully big,” I said.

“He’s gentle,” Ceorth replied. “That’s all that matters. Come here. You can pet him.”

“What’s his name?” I asked. The horse had large eyes that looked like vessels full of dark liquid, and long eyelashes. I cautiously reached a hand toward his nose. The animal’s breath was warm and damp.

“Brytta,” Ceorth replied. “Means ‘giving,’ in my language. Go on, you can touch his nose. He’d not bite in a thousand years.”

“Brytta,” I repeated. “That’s nice.” The horse’s skin was soft. I slid my hand up to scratch his forelock, and he lowered his head towards me, long ears twitching.

“See? He likes you. He likes everyone, so long as they’re gentle to him as he is to them.”

I drew back again, looked at Brytta’s flanks, and the pale criss-crossing lines over them where the hair no longer grew.

“He’s got scars,” I said.

“A veteran.”

“Like you,” I offered.

“If you like. Come here,” he said, and placed the end of the halter in my hand. “Try leading him.”

I did, stepping tentatively out in front. It felt strange, to have this massive animal at my back, towering over me and responding to my weight at the other end of the lead all the same.

“It’s all right. He’ll follow you. See?”

“I see,” I said, and looked behind me. I thought I could feel the horse’s movement through the rope, the way he shook his head lightly to drive off the flies.

“There aren’t so many like Brytta left, not after the War,” Ceorth explained as we made a slow circle about the paddock. “The cries of the hell-hawks and the shadow of their wings ruined a great many good beasts, and no few stout war horses among those. Naught but madness in their eyes, and there were a lot that no one could gentle, afterwards, not the best of our trainers.”

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“Had to turn them loose. That, or put them out of their torment. Nothing else for it.” 

“You would think that more Men would have gone mad, and stayed that way, if so many horses were ruined like that,” I said. “I mean, more than actually were, already.”

Ceorth shrugged without breaking stride. Even with the crutch his gait had grown remarkably natural. “I think beasts are more honest than Men,” he said. “They see to the heart of things. Whereas we have ways of looking away, and lying to ourselves, and telling ourselves stories.”

“Huh,” I said, and glanced back over my shoulder at Brytta again. 

“I think that’s about enough of that,” Ceorth said, once we’d made almost a full circle about the paddock. “Up you get.”

“Now?” I asked, looking at the stirrups. Brytta was such a tall horse that they were about level with my shoulders.

“You wanted to sit a horse, didn’t you?”

“I do,” I said, and took a deep breath. Ceorth helped me climb up into the saddle. I was afraid I might hurt him by pressing him into his crutch as he took my weight, but if I did, he made no indication. He chided me when I hesitated in putting one leg over on the other side. And then I was sitting a horse for the first time. I clutched the pommel.

“All right?” he asked me.

I looked down at him. “I’m awfully high up.”

He snorted. “And you don’t think you’re awfully high when you’re up in your Houses on the Sixth Circle? This is nothing.” I tucked my skirts in around me. “If it makes you feel any better, I can only see a little bit of your ankles,” he added. I scowled.

“Shall I lead him for you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and he held the halter and walked Brytta around the edge of the paddock as slowly and steadily as I had been leading him a few minutes ago. It was a strange thing, feeling a great beast moving beneath me like that. I thought of real riders, of men whose horses went at a run for hours on end. A breeze stirred Brytta’s mane and blew a few loose strands of my own hair into my eyes. I let go of the pommel so that I could tuck the hair behind my ears.

As he walked, Ceorth advised me on how I should sit and how I should hold the reins, and he told me the names of different parts of the saddle and the bridle and why they were important. “Later I’ll show you how to put them all on, yourself, so that you can get from stable to saddle with no need of any help,” he told me. 

“I’ll need help getting up,” I said.

“Mounting block,” he shrugged.

“Now,” he said, some time later, “I think you can handle him on your own for a bit.” Before I could say anything, he had detached the halter-rope from the bridle, and Brytta and I were standing unmoored in the paddock.

“How do I…?” I began.

“Just touch him with your heels to start him walking,” Ceorth replied. “Harder than that, or he won’t even feel it. You’re as likely to hurt him as you are to hobble him under your weight, I promise. There you are.”

“I see.” And the horse moved beneath me, once again.

“We’ll make a rider of you, yet. And to stop him, pull on the reins. Yes, but harder than that. There.”

I looked down at him again. “Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me yet,” he said, but he was smiling. “You’ve a lot of work ahead of you.” 

Some time later I was back on the ground, on my own two feet. I felt fine, though the insides of my legs were a bit sore, and I wondered how long that would last.

“That friend of yours,” Ceorth was saying. “What was her name, again?”

“You know very well what her name is,” I said.

“You might ask her if she’d be interested, as well. In riding, that is.”

“Ask her yourself,” I said.

He shrugged, gestured humbly at the crutch under his arm. “It’s a long way up to the Sixth Circle.”

“Won’t seem more than a stone’s throw, if you fancy her.”

“I never said I—”

Now it was my turn to scoff. “Of course you do. It’s all right, everyone does.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Even your young man?”

“He’d better not.” I smiled. “At any rate, I suppose I can give Elloth your regards. But I have to warn you, she’s much more of a lady than me. She might not be so eager to show you her ankles.”

Ceorth grinned. “Everything in its own time.”


	6. The Butchers' Quarter

In the early hours of the morning we went down to the First Circle, to the butchers’ quarter where the slaughterhouses were. On market days, the meat vendors were permitted to bring up cuts and carcasses to sell in stalls on the upper circles, but my mother had always preferred to buy directly from the men on the lowest levels of the City.

When I was old enough to go by myself, she would count out coins into my palm, and I would make the journey down. We would almost always buy from the same shop, which belonged to the husband of one my mother’s friends. The friend and my mother did not see one another so often anymore, but she and the husband were kind; they sold to us at the same price nearly every time, and I did not have to bargain, which is why my mother was able to send me alone.

Today, I noticed that their shop was shuttered, as it had been since before the War. I had heard that the family had lost two boys. This was not our destination, today, at any rate. Valacar knocked on the door of one of the larger shops not far from the Gate, and the butcher there let us in. There was the smell of hay and blood, and the sound of cattle lowing.

“Sir,” the butcher nodded at Valacar. He was a tall thin man about my mother’s age. He was wiping his large hands on his apron. Then he looked at me. “And this would be your…”

“Apprentice,” Valacar said.

To his credit, the man only nodded. “Miss,” he said to me. I nodded in return.

The Houses had a long-running contract with the Butchers’ Guild (most of us found this rather amusing), and the War had proved only an interruption to this agreement. By this contract, we were allowed to have animal carcasses brought up to the Sixth Circle, though because of the market-day rules, there were only certain days of the week that such goods could be transported up. Doubtless some Warden or Master along the line could have requested a special exemption for us, but most surgeons preferred to go directly to the source.

“We’ve one from last night, hung up,” the butcher said to Valacar. “Or I can get you one, fresh.”

“Fresh would be better. If you please,” Valacar replied. 

“Will you want to do it yourself?” the butcher asked. “There’s some prefer to.”

Valacar shook his head, smiled a little. “We’d best leave it to the more practiced among us.”

The man grunted in assent and wiped his hands on the front of his apron once more, and headed towards the rear of the shop. The bulk of the herds and stock were kept out beyond the Gate, on the fields, of course, but most lower-circle butchers kept small pens as well.

“Why do we need him to slaughter a new one?” I asked after the butcher had gone.

“Easier to see how the blood moves.” He looked at me. “I hope those aren’t your nice clothes.”

***

The morning air was cool, and the freshly-killed cow lay steaming on the floor of one of the butcher’s back rooms, only marked so far by the wet line of ruby at its throat. The butcher had rolled it over so that it lay belly-up, bent limbs in the air, splayed and awkward upon a large piece of rough sack-cloth. I opened one of the instrument cases and looked at Valacar.

“Go ahead,” he said.

I considered a moment, then chose a knife, knelt on the floor and began to open it up.

***

The feel of my blade going through skin was strange, but it was easier than I’d thought it wood be, even with the tough hide of a cow. I began at the skin under a foreleg and moved down from there, wiping the knife blade off on the coat now and again. I peeled back layers, lifted organs. Valacar spoke through it, asking me questions, pointing out different things, telling me whether this or that was more similar in a man, or different. My hands were sticky with blood, and I wiped the sweat from my brow with the back of my forearm. I practiced with the bone saws, cutting through ribs and legs.

My knees hurt. I sat back on my heels.

“Do surgeons ever use men for practice—dead men, I mean?” I asked.

Valacar thought a moment. “It’s not forbidden,” he said. “But a person must consent to it—request it, even, before his death. And you can imagine how many there are who do that.”

I nodded, thought of our stone tombs. Even the necessity of the funeral fires on the Pelennor had seemed an affront.

“In the event of a strange death, surgeons and healers may be allowed to make an examination of the corpse. Though generally not one so exhaustive as this.” He gestured to the array of skin and parts spread out before us. Flies were beginning to gather.

“We’ll have to finish, soon,” he told me. “Why don’t you take out the heart?”

So I did. It was heavy and warm in my hand. I thought of it in its recent life, its endless pulsing in the breast of this animal till the butcher’s knife had quieted it.

“That’s amazing,” I said.

***

Later, after I had washed my hands and arms up to my elbows, I did some sketches of the cow and the bones and organs. I was not too bad at that, or at least better than I was at writing things down. Everything was tangled and overlapped in real life, colors and sections merging into one another in a way that looked like nothing much if you didn’t know what you were looking for. The trick was to resolve everything, to see through the confusion and clean up the lines.

“You’ve an eye for that,” Valacar said, looking over my work as the butcher gathered up the pieces of the dismembered animal within the corners of the sackcloth and began to drag it all away.

“Thanks,” I said. I lifted the pail I had just filled with water, and threw the contents over the floor so that the blood and viscera that had seeped through the cloth would run out and down into the gutter.

“I think I’d like to do it,” I told Valacar.

“Do what?”

“Ask to have my body given for practice. After I die. All of us healers, should do it, shouldn’t we? Especially if no one else will.”

“And what would your family think of that?”

“It wouldn’t be their business, would it? If my mother wanted to, I would honor her in it.”

He stared at me for a long moment.

“What?” I asked.

“You still have blood on your face,” he replied, and handed me a handkerchief.


	7. Water

As summer wore on, the nightmares started again. On waking, only pieces remained—the edge of a black wing, and sometimes the noise, which was worse. Men in the wards trying to speak to me, but when they opened their mouths, only blood came out. Sometimes there were teeth. 

The dream that came to me over and over was one in which I was lying in bed. There would be a terrible feeling of weight on my chest, as if some animal were sitting there. It was dark, and the door to the room was ajar. Just beyond it I could see a figure—man or woman or something other, I couldn’t tell—with its back to me, and I knew that it was about to turn around and face me, and I knew that this would be the most horrible thing of all.

I would wake up, always with a start, and crying out more often than not. And then my mother would be beside me, stroking my hair and murmuring to me the way she did when I was a little girl. And, when I was a little girl, I would feel myself loosen against her, feverish with relief.

But I was older now—much too old to still be giving her this kind of grief—and things were different. There were pieces of coldness in me that even her warmth could not reach. Things had been different before the Siege, before she had left and I had stayed. Until then, I’d never spent so much as a night away from her, nor many of my days, for that matter. She’d known where I was morning til night, and our lives were like one endless conversation as we worked and cooked and cleaned and looked after the house and the boys. And I’d liked it that way, had never thought it might be otherwise. That was how it went between most girls and their mothers, after all, until the daughters were married and left.

But there was so much that had happened. There was a distance and a silence between us that neither of us knew how to cross. She must have felt it keenly. All throughout the Siege and after, until the day she returned, I had longed for her more than I had felt the need of food and water and sleep. And now I was glad that she was back, of course, but her presence was not all the vast relief I had craved—how could it have been? Much of the time I did not know what to say to her. I did not want her to suffer on my account.

“Your mother is worried for you,” Fíriel said to me. We had walked past the great Gate—or, rather, where the old Gate had stood and where the new one was being built—and out on to the fields. The afternoon was sunny but mild, and the breeze felt good at my back.

“Did she tell you as much?” I asked her. We were moving along the edge of a field where a farmer was breaking new rows of sod. A young field hand was leaning into the plow. It always surprised me, that summer and many years afterward, to see the brown earth that lay beneath the Pelennor, to see that all had not been burnt bone-dry.

“She says you’re not sleeping well.”

“Neither is she, thanks to me,” I replied ruefully.

I felt myself tread on something flat and hard, and I stopped for a moment and worried the ground with the toe of my shoe. After a few moments more I stooped to pick up what I had found.

“Arrowhead,” I said, holding it in my open palm.

Fíriel glanced at it. “Can you tell where from?”

“No.” I paused. “Can you?”

She studied it more closely. “Southron, maybe. Too slender for Mordor, and I don’t think our archers or Rohan’s used that shape.”

“Ah.” I considered putting it in my pocket to give to my brother and my cousin, but then I let it drop. They’d gathered more than enough, already.

Fíriel looked at the ground where I had let it fall, and reached down. At first I thought she wanted to retrieve it, again, but something else had caught her eye. She picked up a dark stone, flat and round, and held it in her palm as I had done with the metal point.

“Do you know how to skip rocks?” she asked.

We turned south and west, walking with the City walls at our right shoulders, and then followed the silvery ribbon of the stream that ran from the South Cistern until it widened and pooled into a small pond before flowing out once more at the other side.

“You have to find a flat thin rock, like this one,” Fíriel told me. “And then you put a spin on it, and keep it level to the water’s surface…” She stood with her left shoulder closest to the edge of the pond, and thrust the stone at the water with a quick broad thrust of her right arm. The stone skimmed over the surface, touching the water three or four times before dropping beneath it. Sets of ripples met and overlapped with one another.

“That’s lovely,” I said.

She studied the ground again before picking up another stone, smooth and slender like the first one she’d found. She put it in my hand.

On my first try, the stone simply dropped into the water with a neat plopping noise, as if I had tossed it in an arc. My second try, and my third and my fourth were little different.

Fíriel showed me how it was done, again, and placed another stone in my hand. “Here,” she said. “Curl your forefinger around it, like this. That will be where it leaves your fingers last. And keep low to the surface.”

I thought about everything she’d told me, so far, and then I led forward with my left foot and threw the stone over the water. This time, instead of sinking straight in, it did a little hop of the surface of the water and made a shallow arc before going under. 

Fíriel smiled at me. “There you are,” she said. “After you get the first one, it’s much easier.”

And so we kept picking up rocks and skipping them. I got up to three skips, then four. I enjoyed the rhythm of it, steady and deliberate. I had always liked having something to do with my hands.

After a while, Fíriel paused with a stone in her right hand. “Your mother doesn’t know, does she?” she said.

“Doesn’t know what?” I asked. 

She said nothing, 

I turned away, tossed another rock. “She knows it was bad,” I said. “For everyone who stayed.”

“She’s your mother.”

“She knows something’s wrong with me.” 

There was another moment of silence. Fíriel threw her stone, which skimmed handily over the water’s surface maybe seven or eight times, the places where the stone touched growing closer and closer together as it went further out.

We both watched its progress until it finally sunk. I had noticed that after each throw, she would hold her position for a few moments, her weight on her front foot, her right arm poised effortlessly in front of her after she’d followed through. She was beautiful, I thought.

Then she asked, “Are you angry with her?”

“For leaving me?” I said. Fíriel nodded.

I had two stones in my left hand, and they made a clicking noise as they touched together.

“It was my choice.”

“That’s not an answer,” she said, mildly.

“No,” I said. I took a breath and looked away. “Sometimes.”

Suddenly I felt very tired, as if the day had weight and it were pressing down on my shoulders. I sat down on the grass and set the rocks down on the ground beside me. Fíriel remained standing, as if she were contemplating me at a new remove. Having nothing better to do, I stared at the hem of her skirt.

“And you?” I asked. “Do you get nightmares?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Of course I do,” she said, and now she sat down beside me. I didn’t look at her, but picked up the stones again, felt their warm weight in my hand.

“About the…” I started. “About the beasts?” Even saying the word, I felt a slight catch in my throat. I still had a hard time thinking of them as “beasts,” as if they were anything like horses or cattle or even wolves. To my mind they were still like dark holes, rents in the fabric of the day, more abyss than substance. It was as if, even now, I could not stray too close to the memory of them, lest I be pulled in with nothing to hold on to.

“Sometimes,” she said. She leaned back, weight on the heels of her hands. I nodded. The hell-hawks were one thing I could not get too close to. But, at the very least, I could put a name on them, trot them out when speaking to another. There were other things that I had to approach sidelong, had to creep past as if I were on a ledge.

“What else?” I asked. “What else do you dream about?”

She was silent for a long time, and I thought she was not going to answer me. But then she said, “The wards, sometimes. The worst of it, when all the hours seemed to run together.”

I nodded. I knew, or at least I thought I did.

“And what about you?” she asked quietly.

I stared into my lap and thought about the figure in the doorway, thought about how so many doors in my waking life would now have to stand ajar. If there was anyone to whom I could tell my dreams—any of my dreams—it would have been Fíriel. But not for the first time, I felt small and stupid in the face of it all, and the right words did not come.

Instead, I said, “I don’t like being in the dark. I’d burn down a candle every night, if I could. Fall asleep with it lit.”

She shifted her weight beside me, put her hand on top of my head. I resisted the urge to lean in to her like a child.

“You’ll be all right,” she said. “And you’ll just have to trust me on that point.”

I nodded. I did not know what answer I’d hoped for, if indeed I’d hoped for one, at all.

“Will you talk to your mother?” she asked me.

“I’ll think on it,” I said, though as soon as the words left my mouth, I knew I would not.

If Fíriel guessed at any falsehood on me, she kept it to herself. We stood up and brushed the summer grass from our skirts and threw the last of our stones.


	8. Camp-follower

“Beren will walk me home, tonight,” I informed Valacar. 

The summer days were lengthening, but most of the time there was reading and writing practice to be done after the work in the surgery. Oftentimes I was in the Houses until after sunset, and well after my mother had already finished her day-shift and gone home to start supper. On these evenings, Valacar would lock the door to the surgery behind us after we had finished, and walk me to my mother’s house without remark or complaint, though it was well out of his way. On our route to the Fifth Circle, he would sometimes ask me questions about the work we had done, or have me repeat back something I learned. Other times we were silent, which I did not mind. Everyone who had done time in the Houses—and this went doubly for those of us who had waited out the Siege—was well used to keeping company with one another without feeling the need to speak.

“Ah,”said Valacar, though he sounded somewhat absent. He had been looking over the notes I had made during the day. 

“They’ve returned from field exercises in South Ithilien, just today. His company, I mean.”

“Good,” Valacar said. After a few more moments, he asked, “He’s courting you, then?” Still not looking up from the papers.

“I, ah…” I thought about this for a moment, somewhat surprised. “He asked my mother if he could visit me at home, and she said he could, as long as she was there, too. So I suppose he is.” I thought a moment more, and quickly added, “You don’t have to tell her what time I’ve left the Houses, though.”

Valacar looked up at me then. “You think she would ask me?” 

“No,” I replied, “not really. Only just in case…” I trailed off.

His only reply to this was a lifted brow. 

“In case it takes me longer. To get home,” I finished.

“I see.” He studied me for a moment. I concentrated very hard on not taking a section of my skirts in my hands and wringing the fabric like a wash-rag. 

“As long as you’re here on time tomorrow morning, you’ll hear nothing from me,” he said, and inclined his head slightly towards the open door. “Now, get you gone.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t mention it.”

***

Beren met me in the atrium. He was smiling, and even by torchlight I could see that his skin was tanned, and his face lightly dusted with freckles from long days spent in the field, in summer.

“I’ve news for you,” he said, offering me his hand.

“Good news?” I asked, taking it. His fingers were rough and warm as they closed around mine.

“Could be,” he said. 

We sat on one of the small grassy spots, intersected by footpaths, behind the hedgerows in the northwest gardens.

“Did you miss me?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Perhaps a bit. We’ve quite a lot to do, here, you know.” I made a show of tucking my skirts about me in short, prim movements.

“‘Perhaps a bit.’ Is that how it is, now?” It was dark, but I could hear the smile in his voice.

“Well, you can’t expect me to…” 

I stopped, because he had put his fingers under my chin and leaned in and kissed me. I reached out, touched his cheek, kissed him back. For an infantryman, he could have a light touch when he wanted to. That was one of the things I liked most about him, this gentleness, as if it were something he had worked hard to preserve even as he’d walked forward through a short lifetime of war, like something fragile held in the hollow of his hands. I could only hope he had enough for the both of us.

“What’s your news?” I asked, several minutes later, when we were both feeling considerably less ironic. 

“Mm,” he remarked. I made a small noise of surprise as he slid a hand under my knees and shifted me towards him, and then I was sitting on his lap.

“A ruse, then?” I said. “Surely you can do better.” 

“I can always do better,” he replied, and kissed my cheek.

“Really,” I said.

“All right,” he sighed. “The King will see the border defenses rebuilt. Come harvest-time, my company will shift out to the garrison at Poros. Perhaps sooner.”

“Poros?”

He nodded. “Could be closer,” he said. “Then again, it could also be farther.”

“For how long?” I asked.

“It’ll be a year, at least, before they begin to move men in and out, I imagine. They want a good foundation; that post has been lacking in strength for some time.”

“I see.” 

“Don’t look so grim,” he said, and pushed a strand of hair off my face. “It’s a border-post this time, not the Black Gate.”

“I’m not grim,” I said. “A year seems a long time, is all.”

“It doesn’t need to be,” he said. “You could go, too.”

“Beren…” I started.

“If we were married, you could go, too.”

“Apprentices aren’t allowed to get married,” I said.

“I know,” he smiled, and kissed me. “But they might stay the rule for you. Seeing as they’ve already done so, for another law.”

“And besides, I’ve only just started.”

“The Houses will still be here in a year’s time.” 

“Beren.” I pulled back slightly. “You know I can’t.” He said nothing. “And what would I do at Poros, anyhow?” I asked.

“You’d be a soldier’s wife, of course,” he said, and kissed me again. 

I broke away. “A camp-follower?” I laughed.

“No,” he said, the slightest edge of affront in his voice. “A healer, for one. Of which there’d be ample need. You’d have a house of your own.” He paused. “And weren’t you saying that you wanted to quit the City, for a while? See different things?”

“Yes,” I replied, “but I didn’t mean…”

“What did you mean?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But you said you’d wait for me.”

He sighed. “That I did. But I didn’t say I’d always find it easy.”

“Me, neither.” 

I ran my hand through his hair, felt the heat of his scalp. His forehead was damp. He pulled me in closer, tilted his head and kissed my neck. I drew in my breath. He had one hand on my ankle, was moving the pad of his thumb gently back and forth against the bare skin. The next time he kissed me, he slid his palm up to my calf, under my skirts. Something inside me clenched painfully; I took his hand and moved it away.

“Sorry,” he muttered, and drew back. I shifted myself so that I was no longer sitting across his lap. 

We were both silent for a few moments.

“At any rate, I’m not ready to be married now, anyhow,” I said quietly.

“Sorry,” he repeated.

“It’s not your fault. You know that.”

“I’d never do anything you didn’t want. You know that,” he said.

“I know.” Again we fell silent for a while, and then I said, “May I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

I cleared my throat. “Have you ever…?” I trailed off.

“Have I ever, what?”

“With a girl. You know.”

“Well, you’re a girl, and I’m with you now.” He laughed softly.

I leaned over and smacked him lightly on the arm. “You know what I mean.”

“I have,” he said, and looked at me when I said nothing. “Does that bother you?” he asked.

“No,” I replied. Then I shrugged, and said, “I don’t know.”

“What about you?” he asked. “Have you, ever?”

“No,” I said. “Except for…”

He winced. “I didn’t mean that,” he said, quickly.

“I know you didn’t.”

We were quiet again, and I listened to the chirping of insects in the garden, all around us. It was summer, after all, but I had not noticed exactly when they had come back. There had been a time when I had thought they would never come back, neither the crickets nor the birds—the same as everyone in the City, really. But here they were, again, having stirred their wings enough to alight here in the trees planted between stone columns.

“Will you at least think about Poros?” Beren asked. “Just think about it.”

“All right,” I agreed. And I would think about it, not with a _yea_ or _nay_ in mind, but simply trying to imagine a garrison-post beside a river, and a house without my mother and brothers, out from behind the walls of the City, and a ring on my finger.

I stood up, and held out my hand to Beren. “Walk me home?” I asked.

And he did.


End file.
